The Lost
Per request, I have compiled a review of the Futura Project and its fallout, 5 years after whistleblowers and intense media attention forced us to end the project and release the remaining subjects (dubbed “the Lost” by popular media). Futura was a joint initiative spearheaded by Hanto Genomics and strongly backed by Cognite, with numerous other partners (complete list). The project was initially proposed by my mentor, Dr. Antonio Pascal, whose team had proven the feasibility of Accelerated Life Experience Training (ALET) after a series of pilot studies with two small (N<1000) samples. While it is true that these early pilot studies used both older subjects and a lesser amount of time dilation, the rationale for the Futura Project’s ambitious program was justified by a remarked decrease in transhumanity’s population due to the Fall, a system-wide stagnant population growth rate (blamed on various factors including increased longevity, available contraception, and rising despair over troubling times), as well as a desire to move aggressively into a new technological sector in the hopes of obtaining a competitive advantage. Futura began immediately in the wake of the Fall with an initial seed population of [][][][][] test subjects culled from extant genetic material and gestated to between 1 week and 6 months after birth. Of these, less than 10% were live births from either a surrogate or genetic birth mother who had perished during the Fall. The majority came from our Lunar and Martian labs and were brought to term within an exowomb. After the sample was selected, all subjects were sleeved into our fast-growth futura-brand biomorph bodies and inducted into customized simulspace accelerated learning environments. The project made extensive use of emergent technologies and techniques culled from recaptured TITAN facilities, including neogenetic traits for the futura morphs and time distortion applications for captive simulspace populations. Futura ran concurrently on three different research stations with a combined staff of 2,211 researchers and support personnel and 45 AGIs custom-programmed for expert child development. Project goals were to raise each child to a subjective 18 years life experience in 3 years objective time. Despite omnipresent observation and real-time adjustment of the simulspace and educational programming for optimal normality, somewhere along the way the project suffered a breakdown in quality assurance and parameter monitoring that resulted in a near total failure at empathy modeling. We first observed this effect 11 months into the project when the subjects had aged to approximately 6 years of age. Incidences of animal cruelty and acting out had spiked, though at that time they remained within acceptable standards. Over the next few months this trend continued and Dr. Pascal authorized the usage of more authoritative “parenting” to attempt to correct for the borderline sociopathic behavior that was being exhibited by 23.19% of all subjects by the 18-month mark (9 years of age). We now know that these changes had the unintended consequence of suppressing overt displays of cruelty and violence and merely taught the majority of subjects how to conceal their psychoses. It was also at this time that the first deaths occurred. The initial waves were thought to be accidents and both the victim and perpetrator were usually backed up to a week or so of subjective time. Post-project analysis now shows that 43.87% of our subjects had engaged in at least one act of premeditated murder by the 24-month mark (12 years of age) and the counseling protocols were only training them how to lie more effectively. It was at this point that myself and Dr. Aaron Bharani advocated pulling the plug on the project and bringing the subjects out to real time and intensive counseling. Dr. Pascal vetoed our concerns without ever taking them to the board. As the project spiraled towards its conclusion, a fork of Dr. Bharani went public at the 34-month mark, inciting a firestorm of controversy. While Dr. Pascal successfully tied up investigators, hoping to see the project through to its conclusion, the incident at our Legacy research station occurred. Initial findings concluded that one or more of the subjects had escaped the program and were in fact responsible for the habitat’s environmental failures and the thousands of subsequent deaths. In the face of intense public and private scrutiny, many of the partners involved in the project attempted to pull out and even eliminate all traces of their involvement. In the resulting chaos, an estimated [][][][][] subjects were quietly released into the system’s general population. It was only after this occurred that all known subjects were identified as having been infected with the Watts-MacLeod strain of the exsurgent virus, though when and how this occurred remains troubling and unclear. Though later orders resulted in all remaining subjects being euthanized and/or backed up into cold storage, only [][][][][] of the released subjects were recaptured. Of the rest, [][][][][] pursued sanctuary with sympathetic authorities, [][][][][] went public and submitted themselves to extensive psychotherapy, [][][][][] were killed in incidents of violence and not resurrected, and the rest presumably went into hiding. Category:Setting Category:Core Book